Ian Hocking When I was twelve, I bought a text-adventure game called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for my Amiga 500 computer. The box had ‘Don’t Panic!’ written in large, friendly letters on the front and showed a green alien sticking its tongue out. Inside was a floppy disk, planning permission for a hyperspace […]
Alan Warner – The Man Who Walks
Jerome Deg It is difficult to know where to start with a writer as good as Warner and a novel as diverse and brilliant as The Man Who Walks. The danger is that you’ll end up sounding like movie-blurb whilst bandying words like ‘genius’, ‘spiralling, rip-roaring’ and ‘provocative’. It is difficult to precisely quantify why […]
Norman Mailer – Ancient Evenings
Ian Hocking It is difficult to review Ancient Evenings, but not as difficult as reading it. It is 300, 000 words long. Its American author, Norman Mailer, is recognized as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His first book, The Naked and the Dead, was a New York Times bestseller for […]
Nicholson Baker – A Box Of Matches
Chris Hall Or, Something Funny Happened On The Way Down To Tie My Shoelaces. Yes, after a few (highly idiosyncratic) non-fiction outings we’re back in the terrifyingly detailed world of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. Where there were escalators, urinals and drinking straws, there are now cafetieres, soap bars and envelopes. The novel is 33 […]
Patricia Duncker : Seven Tales Of Sex And Death : Dark Star
Chris Hall talks to Patricia Duncker about sex, death and sending porn through the German postal system Speaking from her home in Aberystwyth on the day of the Stop the War rally, Patricia Duncker is excitedly bellowing down the phone. “My niece called and asked if I was going on the march and I said […]
Patricia Duncker : Hallucinating Foucault : Insanity Clause
Chris Mitchell gets philosophical with Patricia Duncker about her novel Hallucinating Foucault “Madness, death, sexuality, crime; these are the subjects that attract most of my attention.” So said the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the century’s most audacious intellectuals, who died of AIDS in 1984. Only Foucault’s books remain as a reminder of […]
Martin Millar : Love And Peace With Melody Paradise : Do It Yourself
Chris Mitchell talks to Martin Millar about his pro-traveller novel Love And Peace With Melody Paradise and how setting up his own website has brought him new readers What do you do if you’re an author who’s published several novels to widespread critical acclaim and then get unceremoniously dumped by your publisher? You’ve guessed it […]
Jacques Roubaud – The Great Fire Of London: a story with interpolations and bifurcations
Stephen Mitchelmore I have tried to write about Jacques Roubaud’s novel The Great Fire of London many times. No, that’s not true. I have not written anything. Rather, I have felt many times the need to write about The Great Fire of London. But that’s not true either. I have felt the need to remove […]
Damien Wilkins – Chemistry
Dorothy Johnson The title of Damien Wilkins’ novel refers to substances, pills and potions but also to the reactions people set off within each other, and the possibility that they might result in unimaginable consequences. The book concerns a family deeply immersed in the world of medicines and chemicals, as pharmacists, doctors and addicts, and […]
Banana Yoshimoto / Michael Emmerich : Goodbye Tsugumi : Two Worlds And In Between
Jonathan Kiefer discusses the delicate art of translation with Michael Emmerich, English translator of Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto Here’s what it means to be a literary translator: If you haven’t heard of Banana Yoshimoto, you probably haven’t heard of Michael Emmerich. If you have heard of Banana Yoshimoto, you probably haven’t heard of Michael Emmerich. […]
Andrey Kurkov – Death And The Penguin
Stephen Mitchelmore This book is a page-turner. The simplicity and overt plainness of the prose combine with the perverse congeniality of the foreground subject matter to make one carry on, ignoring worldly concerns. And while the plot is complex it is also strangely unimportant, compared, that is, to the foreground. Viktor, a 39-year-old journalist, lives […]
Alan Moore – The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Chris Mitchell Take several classic 19th century literary characters – Allen Quatermain from "King Solomon’s Mines", Captain Nemo from "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea", The Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, among others – bring them together as an ego-ridden but intriguing outfit under the auspices of the British Secret Service, set them within […]
Doris Lessing – The Sweetest Dream
Edmund Hardy Our sweetest dreams are, apparently, ideological. Those seductive systems of thought which attract people who want to save the world on their own terms, but who end up mired in disillusion or pedantry. There’s prime potential for grim humour when people play at being revolutionaries, and Lessing is well-placed to crack the jokes: […]
Chuck Palahniuk : I Want To Have Your Abortion
Jayne Margetts on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk When Bret Easton Ellis unleashed his novel, American Psycho, with its beautiful 18+ logo scripted on a lurid, Picasso-esque cover, my mind went into overdrive. Ellis’ literary missile was unlike anything written before. Its descriptive prose bled psychosis, its painstaking attention to detail as a Guide Book […]
Paul Auster : Cruel Universe
Adrian Gargett on the writing of Paul Auster Paul Auster is not a realist. As the title of his latest book The Book of Illusions suggests, he inhabits a world of illusion. His novels are worldly, finely tuned, elegant and knowingly self-referential. An academic whose wife and two sons die in a plane crash, leaving […]
David Lodge – Thinks…
Kevin Walsh David Lodge’s latest novel, Thinks…, sees him return to familiar territory. Set in the fictitious University of Gloucester, it tells of Ralph Messenger, womanising cognitive scientist, who sets out to bed Helen Reed, a recently-widowed novelist who arrives on campus to teach a summer writing course. Written from three viewpoints – Ralph’s dictaphone […]
Cees Nooteboom – All Souls’ Day
Stephen Mitchelmore "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there." Maurice Blanchot How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary cameraman and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel, asks it too. He thinks […]
Rachel Seiffert – The Dark Room
Sally-Ann Spencer We have all seen the photos – the terrible photos of skeletal corpses, the frightening pictures of uniformed killers. In The Dark Room, Rachel Seiffert returns to the horror of the Third Reich to reveal these and other, less familiar images. Alongside photos of concentration camps, we see pictures of a kindly mother […]
The Modern Fantasy Diet
Seán Harnett argues that fantasy fiction has become a bloated, pretensious caricature of its own possibilities It’s like looking at Marlon Brando as he is today and remembering what he used to be: he used to be slim, man. He used to be dangerous. He used to mean something. Heroic fantasy used to be slim, […]
Bruce Wagner : I’ll Let You Go : Loss And Reconciliation
Dan Epstein talks to Wild Palms creator Bruce Wagner about his new novel I’ll Let You Go I first met Bruce Wagner in Los Angeles around the middle of 1997. I was and still am a rabid David Cronenberg afficionado. I was walking along the Venice Beach walk when I passed two gentlemen wearing suits. […]
John Ridley : A Conversation With The Mann : A Real Comedian
Dan Epstein meets John Ridley, screenwriter and hard-boiled crime novelist John Ridley is a man of many talents and prolific with them too – stand-up comedian, screenwriter for Three Kings, Undercover Brother, Oliver Stone’s U Turn and author of Everybody Smokes In Hell, Stray Dogs, Love Is a Racket and, most recently, A Conversation With […]
Christopher Miller – Simon Silber: Works For Solo Piano
Jonathan Kiefer talks to Christopher Miller about his debut novel Simon Silber: Works For Solo Piano Although the narrator of Christopher Miller’s debut novel is not to be trusted, the author himself seems very reliable. In person he is gentle and friendly, and wouldn’t think of putting you on, perhaps because Miller isn’t yet accustomed […]
John Crowley – Little, Big
Seán Harnett Little, Big, first published in 1981 and winner of that year’s World Fantasy Award, has recently been re-issued by Orbit as part of its Fantasy Masterworks series. It’s both a welcome decision (the book has been out-of-print for ages) and a brave one: outside a small cabal of devoted fans Little, Big does […]
Charlotte Carter : Rhode Island Red, Coq Au Vin, Drumsticks : Red Hot And Blue
Chris Wiegand It’s hard not to fall in love with Nanette Hayes, the self-effacing heroine of Rhode Island Red, Coq Au Vin and Drumsticks – a trio of musical mysteries from African-American author Charlotte Carter. A sassy, streetwise, sax-playing busker, Nanette is funky, jazzy and soulful. She’s also no stranger to the Blues. Carter’s novels […]
Maurice Blanchot : The Infinite Conversation : The Absent Voice
Stephen Mitchelmore on the writing of Maurice Blanchot There are many remarkable facts about the long life of the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. The strident – perhaps Fascist – nationalism of his pre-War journalism; his near-death at the hands of the Nazis during the war; his reclusive devotion to writing that is similar […]
